This is public service announcement and not a widget review. It is nice to see the government embrace widgets as a means to communicate and extend their reach. There are improvements that could be made in regards to the widgets, but we won’t mention them here as to not distract from the purpose of the widgets.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is charged with protecting the public from unreasonable risks of serious injury or death from thousands of types of consumer products under the agency’s jurisdiction. The CPSC is committed to protecting consumers and families from products that pose a fire, electrical, chemical, or mechanical hazard or can injure children. The CPSC’s work to ensure the safety of consumer products – such as toys, cribs, power tools, cigarette lighters, and household chemicals – contributed significantly to the 30 percent decline in the rate of deaths and injuries associated with consumer products over the past 30 years.

Tired of having your news spoon fed to you by big network suits the and the smaller, chattier suits on cable news? Join Jon Stewart and the Best F#@king News Team Ever as they bring you the news like you’ve never seen it before — unburdened by objectivity, journalistic integrity or even accuracy.

The Daily Show is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning program that takes a reality-based look at news, trends, pop culture, current events, politics, sports and entertainment with an alternative point of view. In each show, anchorman Jon Stewart and a team of correspondents, including Aasif Mandvi, Wyatt Cenac, John Oliver, Jason Jones and Samantha Bee, comment on the day’s stories, employing actual news footage, taped field pieces, in-studio guests and on-the-spot coverage of important news events.

Widgets take a prominent place in the new Droid Does ad campaign from Verizon promoting their new Google Android based phone. Keep in mind this is a national ad campaign running everywhere; traditional media and online.

From the DroidDoes.com site:

Funny. Widgets are so useful and still most phones can’t use them. Droid allows for widgets. So those fantastic pieces of code can do just what they were designed for. Helping you out.

So, if you are viewing Los Angeles and do a search for sushi, you will likely get search results for sushi restaurants. This is a nice little feature for locating points of interest. You can then quickly view more search results or click through to more information and directions to/from the location.

Below is an example of the feature within our widget. The widget is a bit small for everything we’ve packed into it. Since this is a R&D widget and a playground for us, usability is not always on the top of our list. Sorry… However, this shows the possibilities of a travel widget mashup.